Lessons Learned from CMMS Deployments

Organizations learn a great deal about themselves during a CMMS deployment. Some of the top companies across industries such as Energy, Services, Manufacturing have used the lessons they learned to redefine best practices, and everyday processes. As many of our clients have shared their insights with us, we compiled a list of some of the top lessons learn from CMMS Deployments to share.

Collect all foundational data at the beginning of the implementation process. One of the most important lessons learned by a wide variety of our clients is to collect all necessary foundational data at the start of implementation. For example, Cintas Corporation is a top manufacturer of corporate identity uniforms, entrance mats, document management services and more to over 800,000 businesses, through 430 distributed facilities in the US and Canada. After a few years using eMaint, the Cintas team realized that they needed to focus on fundamental data. For Cintas, this meant loading 28,000 assets into the system, in order to use eMaint to yield important decisions such as repair vs. replace, OEE, MTTR, MTBF, and uptime percentages in real-time.

Regional Project Manager and Facility Management Engineer James Wagoner calls this his primary lesson learned, and advises all CMMS users to collect necessary foundational data at the beginning of implementation. You will begin seeing useful, accurate data earlier, and company-wide cultural changes can be made based on data-driven insights into daily processes.

Recognize potential extra costs, and account for them. Utilizing eMaint’s mobile maintenance solution on smartphones, tablets and other electronic devices allows technicians and other employees to input data on-the-go, reducing the need to manually input data on a desktop at the end of the day. For SM Energy, a company focused exploration, development, and production of natural gas and crude oil, operations are distributed across the United States. Operations Reliability Analyst Chris Napoli purchased his team iPads to allow his employees to input data on the go.

Although Napoli says that mobile devices were a big success during and after implementation, it required an unforeseen expense: safe cases for iPads to prevent ignition in the the field. Napoli says this was his major lesson learned during implementation and deployment of eMaint: the extra cost for safety in-the-field. Across all industries, companies work in unique and sometimes dangerous environments where precautions may be necessary. Take a lesson learned from SM Energy, and recognize there may be additional costs to effectively deploy your CMMS solution, and account for them with a flexible, yet extensive budget plan.

“Lock it down” for end users. Managing maintenance for one facility can be a challenge. For companies such as Schneider Electric, who contractually manage maintenance for 18 live data centers, it’s all about the right approach and the tools to match. Showing each center that the maintenance on their facility is being done, and being done right is necessary for Schneider. This means customizable, personal sets of data for all of their clients. How is it possible to keep track of all the unique work requests of these data centers, while maintaining control and organization all in one system? This was a lesson learned by Quality Systems Specialist Jeffrey Martin.

Martin learned to “lock it down” for end users of the eMaint system. This means if you’re managing maintenance in a distributed environment where each facility has unique needs, it is important to specify what information your end user can enter, and how they can enter it. To keep maintenance organized and controlled, it’s also vital to collect data in the same manner, with the same types of work orders. This helps ensure consistency in services and in the information each center will yield from eMaint to help make important data-driven decisions.

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Set specific goals, and understand the areas in need of improvement to guide your CMMS deployment. As CMMS can help companies achieve positive change, it is important to establish your company’s goals from the get-go. This was the method of Marc Cote, C.B. Fleet Laboratories Director of Maintenance and Engineering. CB Fleet is a leading manufacturer of over-the-counter health and beauty care products. With aggressive growth goals at the forefront of the company’s strategy, Cote and his team interviewed technicians, collected foundational data, and developed a vision statement for where the company wanted to be in 5 years. Cote populated eMaint dashboards with these goals, and consistently provide updates to this information.

Cote’s approach to implementation and deployment can be seen as a lesson for any company with similar growth goals. To identify where the main pain points are for employees and develop a sense of where you want to be in the future is an organized way to stay on track and sustain improvements as the excitement of implementation fades.

On-site visits and Boot Camps are a great way to jump start implementation. XTO Energy is a leading natural gas and oil producer with expertise in developing tight gas, shale gas, coalbed methane and unconventional oil resources. David Kylor Stafford, Operations Technician at XTO, believed in a partnership with eMaint throughout all stages of use, and utilized eMaint services to help jump-start usage of the software. At the start of implementation, Stafford scheduled an on-site visit to help set up the system, provided his team with extensive training, then set up an eMaint Boot Camp.

This was a lesson learned for Stafford, and his method sparked positive results for XTO Energy. As the on-site visit and training helped the team become more knowledgeable on eMaint and its features, the Boot Camp served as a way to become fully immersed in the solution. Stafford reported that after the Boot Camp, his team came back to headquarters with new, fresh ideas on how to further their use of eMaint to help everyday processes.